While most companies announce products long before first customer ship with long road maps of when product features are available, Cisco’s Nexus® 9508 is ready now. The independent and open industry Lippis/Ixia team test the Nexus® 9508 at 288-40GbE capacity for layer 3 unicast plus IP multicast latency and congestion management via RFC 2544, 3918 and 2889, respectively. This test is a new industry record as no other data center switch has been tested at 288 40GbE ports. What are really impressive are the results and the engineering achievement of the Cisco team. I’m joined with Bradley Wong, Distinguished Engineer, Technical Marketing, at Cisco, as we review the Cisco Nexus® 9508 test methodologies and results.

Duration: 12 minutes 9 seconds

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Gigamon’s Unified Visibility Fabric architecture provides a new approach to monitoring and management of IT infrastructure. By centralizing tools and connecting them into the Visibility Fabric, significant cost savings and operational efficiencies can be realized. The Unified Visibility Fabric architecture provides pervasive visibility across campus, branch, virtualized and, ultimately, SDN islands and consists of four key components—Visibility Fabric nodes, Management, Orchestration and Applications, which when taken together provide a scalable, flexible and centralized Visibility Fabric solution.

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As organizations continue to virtualize their environments and build out cloud environments, the requirement for more flexible and agile networks is becoming a priority. One of the more promising network architectures being developed to address these challenges is software-defined networking (SDN). Although this space is still being defined, one aspect of SDN, network virtualization, is gaining mindshare. This technology leverages a virtual switch, controller, and virtualization technology. IBM has just announced its offering in this area, called Software Defined Network for Virtual Environments or SDN VE.

As 10 and 40GbE data center networks provide very low latency with less than 10ns of jitter and favorable price points, the ability to converge storage and user traffic onto one physical network has become realistic. In this white paper, Arista details various cloud provider storage options and how they can gain from transporting block storage flows over a 10GbE network.

Growing numbers of smartphones and tablets are pushing enterprise networks to the limit and creating security and management challenges for IT organizations. IT planners must upgrade wireless network infrastructure to accommodate increased traffic demands and put systems and practices in place to efficiently onboard guest devices and users, ensure predictable and reliable services, and protect IT assets. This white paper reviews BYOD administration, performance, and security implications, and describes how by taking a holistic approach to security and management, the HP BYOD solution lets you realize all the benefits of BYOD, with confidence.

The rapid increase of mobile devices is making Wi-Fi the preferred method of network access, predominantly within buildings, but also outside. This trend presents businesses with both tremendous potential and unique challenges. Location analytics, in conjunction with the Cisco® Mobility Services Engine (MSE), enables businesses to realize unprecedented benefits from location-based services:

● Location analytics: Estimates the number of visitors, the amount of time they spend, and the frequency of their visits within the site

● Advanced analytics: Provides knowledge of movement patterns by these visitors while they are in the building

Together, these analytics provide detailed insights into general behavior patterns of people moving and interacting within a venue or open space. Location analytics uses advanced data mining techniques tuned to the type of data Wi-Fi location provides. This data is based on potentially millions of position triangulations made per day by Cisco’s MSE. This white paper discusses the technology and capabilities behind Cisco’s location analytics.

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IP multicast has opened the door to a wide range of applications that are now taken for granted, including audio and video conferencing, online training, news distribution, stock price updates, software distribution, database replication and more. But the widespread use of IP multicasting belies its complexity. Current approaches are ill suited to next-generation IP multicasting applications, such as video surveillance as well as emerging data center transport models, such as VXLAN and NVGRE. Because multicasting is a necessity for next-generation networking, IP Multicast over Avaya VENA Fabric Connect makes it possible to implement multicast routing solutions at lower cost and with greater performance. Find out how by downloading this white paper.

Service providers are under ever-increasing pressure to improve the performance and security of their networks. To meet these challenges, they rely on a bevy of monitoring tools. Monitoring for security and compliance, as well as application and network performance, requires access to an increasing amount of network data, optimally performing monitoring tools and full visibility into the network. Ultimately, the limited number of data access points prevents effective monitoring. The network monitoring switch is a necessary tool in addressing these challenges. Not only does a network monitoring switch solve the problem of TAP and SPAN shortages, it also improves the traffic to all monitoring tools, improving overall
monitoring tool performance and productivity. Find out how by downloading this white paper.

Over the past two years NetScout has invested in Network Monitoring Switch technology, acquiring Simenna in 2011 and ONPATH in 2012. This is the first in a two-part podcast series were Steven Shalita, Vice President of Marketing at NetScout discusses NetScout’s increased investments in the network monitoring switch business. In this podcast we discuss network monitoring switch and fabric market attributes and dynamics. In the second podcast Steve and I review network monitoring design options, service delivery and the implications that virtualization and Software-Defined Networking have on monitoring architectures.

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This is the second of a two-part podcast series were Steven Shalita, Vice President of Marketing at NetScout discusses NetScout’s increased investments in the network monitoring switch business. In this podcast we review network monitoring design options, service delivery and the implications that virtualization and Software-Defined Networking have on monitoring architectures. The first podcast on network monitoring switch and fabric market dynamics can be found here.

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The volume of digital information created and replicated will grow from 1.8 trillion gigabytes in 2011 to 7.9 trillion gigabytes in 2015. IDC

By 2014 70% of IT risk and security officers in the Global 2000 will be required to report at least annually to their board of directors on the state of IT security within their organization. Gartner

There are many drivers to network visibility. The Gigamon Visibility Fabric architecture empowers network and security architects, engineers and operators to design and deploy an intelligent infrastructure by applying user-defined “map” logic to select the appropriate, relevant and critical network traffic flows and deliver them to centralized security, monitoring and management systems. This new approach can extend the network reach of tools to significantly improve return on investment, allows IT organizations to more efficiently manage and secure their network, and provides a solution that can quickly evolve and scale as network needs change.

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To assure 100% throughput, that is no packet loss or network performance degradation takes place during an inter-chassis switch over, Cisco invested in its third generation of Virtual Switch System or VSS. It introduced support for four Supervisors within a VSS, which it calls VS4O for short. VS40 supports a VSS pair to be resilient to up to three simultaneous supervisor failures; providing deterministic and automated recovery from failures and increases network uptime tremendously in the campus backbone. Sudeep Padiyar Senior Product Manager at Cisco Systems and Charles Okochu, Network Engineer at MarketAxess join me to discuss Cisco’s new additions to the Catalyst 6500 and the resiliency network design options it affords to Cisco customers.

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Cisco introduced enhancements to its VXLAN implementation in the Nexus 1000V virtual switch that overcomes the requirement for IP Multicast. In addition Cisco is integrating vPath to VXLAN for service insertion that stitches virtual services into VXLAN overlay tunnels. Network services might include virtual firewalls, application delivery controllers, WAN optimization, network monitors, etc. A final VXLAN challenge that network teams are facing is how to integrate VXLAN into legacy networks and with existing physical networks, appliances and the enterprise WAN. We’ll hear if Cisco has any solutions to get around this issue as well. Han Yang of Cisco joins me to discuss VXLAN, without multicast and with vPath, and how it can be used to deploy virtual network overlays.

Miami Children’s Hospital or MCH deployed an 802.11n Wi-Fi network some two years ago to support their Clinical EMR deployment, which enabled clinicians and physicians to access applications such as PowerChart via mobile devices. The Wi-Fi network also enabled BYOD for patients, families and friends visiting MCH. MCH also developed its Fit4KidsCare mobile application that leverages location services so that food orders or gifts can be delivered to patient rooms while it’s WayFinding feature provides turn-by-turn navigation services to guide patients/family and guest around the complex children’s hospital. Edward Martinez, MCH SVP and Chief Information Officer discusses how its connected mobile network is having a positive impact on clinical operations and patient network services beyond connectivity for mobile devices.

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